What is Product-Market Fit

With 90% of startups failing within their first years in business, it’s crucial to understand if your product or service genuinely satisfies market demand.

While early-stage companies can minimize their potential failure by building out an MVP, it’s only the first step towards verifying the product’s role on the market. Especially, as a lot can change over time, and competing services spring up like mushrooms!

To constantly monitor your product’s importance to its users, “Hacking Growth” author Sean Ellis came up with the product-market fit survey question, which quickly took the world by storm. It asks users blatantly:

“How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use this product?”.

The respondents can answer on a scale – from “very disappointed” to “not disappointed at all”.

So, what makes this question so powerful for companies?

The Benefits of a Product-Market Fit Survey

First and foremost, this simple question tests users’ emotional responses to having a feature or entire service potentially removed from their lives.

When you run this survey among your customers, you collect responses that can, for instance, either strengthen or rebuild your company’s priorities from the ground up.

How’s it so?

If respondents say that your product is indispensable, you can rest assured that it’s worth developing and investing your resources further.

However, if it turns out the evaluated product or feature isn’t really necessary for your customers, you can revisit your direction.

You might, for instance, decide to reshape your offering or to discontinue a product that doesn’t offer any actual value.

This survey template will help you do that and much more!

Product-Market Fit Follow-up Questions

Apart from the simple, closed-ended product-market fit question, you can also decide to dig a little deeper into your customers’ motives.

If a client says that he/she wouldn’t be very disappointed to see your product go, you’ll want to know why. Is it the value for the price? Have they come across a competing service which they’d simply turn to in a heartbeat if your’s was gone?

Or maybe it’s about something completely different – like confusing UX, which doesn’t help users truly comprehend your product’s value?

Conversely, if users can’t imagine living without your product, what makes it so special? Knowing this might help you focus your marketing efforts on emphasizing the features your users love and can’t replace.

The bottom line – regardless of your customers’ sentiments, this product-market fit survey template lets you add relevant, automatic follow-up questions to each answer. All so you can derive the most from your research.

Product-Market Fit Analysis

As mentioned earlier, a product-market fit survey arms your entire company in crucial feedback on your product’s perceived value. Once you collect responses from your users, you’ll then be able to analyze your results easily in Survicate’s built-in analytics tool.

Depending on your preference, you can also export the results in a .csv or .xls file and use it in your other tools, like Excel or Google Data Studio.